Attack of the D&G

"You know who wears sunglasses indoors? Blind people and assholes" - Larry David

The other day, the new logo for the London 2012 Olympics was unveiled (and yes, I know that actually happened months ago, making that sentence about as topical as haemorrhoid cream. But I needed a decent segue, dammit!). For those of you just joining us click here for the logo; but if you like a worded description, basically it’s a retina piercing bright fluoro-pink, sharp edged ‘2012’ arranged in two rows. One could also think of it as a broken swastika. This guy (a design, not art, student) calls it bad design. One can also accurately accuse this logo of being so ugly it gives everyone it touches seizures and cancer of the retinas.

The thing that sticks out about this logo, though, is how 1980s it looks. That bright fluoro and jagged edged motif hasn’t been seen in public since its well deserved execution back when the 90s was introduced to a wide-eyed, bouffant-haired, shoulder-padded population.
The makers of this logo have used the Art Student defence (if you explain something abstractly enough, it’s just got to be right) and said that the logo depicts a modern day London. The sad thing about this comment is that it is completely true. We, as a society, have devolved back to that horrific era of cringe-worthy 80s fashion. Be scared, ladies and menfolk, be very scared.

I remember back when everyone dismissed the 80s as a decade of bad fashion and an overabundance of daggy. If you dare wore something remotely fluoro, or wore sunglasses under a roof, you would be subject to several beatings and name callings. Then one day, the legitimately cool kids at school began wearing hints of this sort of thing, occasionally wearing a pair of op-shop 80s sunglasses, but in a purely ironic isn’t-this-lame way. Then that trend spread to the supposedly cool kids, who saw this as teh coolzor!, incorporating this stuff into their wardrobe and seal-clubbing uniforms. Eventually, celebrities got a hint of this from their PR hounds, and thus began the plague. Fast forward a couple of years, and now everyone is donning the 80s fashion, but in a legitimate this-is-serious-mum kind of way, blinded by supposedly popular culture.

If you think I’m wrong, just pop down to your local seal-clubbery or business faculty in your local university to see this phenomenon in action: A mass of eye-piercing fluoro t-shirts and hoodies brighter than a whole club full of Wanker Boys, scraggy bouffant hairstyles higher than the Tower of Babel (referring to the size of the wearer’s ego, maybe?), and the bug-eyed people wearing face-sized sunglasses – so many freaking face-glasses!

This combination has pretty much become the official uniform of teenagers everywhere. Take a walk around the city and you’ll see at least a third of male teenagers wearing near-identical copies of the following:

• Bouffant, scraggly hair with blonde tips;
  
• A fluoro coloured t-shirt with words like “Shiny Disco Ball” or “I’m a Walking Dance Cliché” in a large, jagged font plastered on the front;
  
• A hoodie with logos and icons synonymously of the 80s (in fluoro, of course);
  
• Jeans that are either so tight you’ll be worried (sorta) that one wrong move will castrate the wearer, or so loose they hang down to the knees;
  
• A belt so large one wouldn’t be too far off in mistaking it as a codpiece/sock-down-the-trousers; white sneakers with some name brand shouting its presence;
  
• And last and most definitely least, the face-sized sunglasses, most likely tinted so that it acts as an impromptu mirror for every other fashion sheep to check that their hair is still perfectly coiffed.

Which brings us to the face-glasses thing, the centrepiece of this fashion rehash. Popularised by such outstanding model citizens as Paris Beckham (I’ll be surprised if the latter ever takes off her face-glasses) and Misha Barton, the face-glasses have taken off in popularity over the past year of so.
The look behind the face-glasses (SEE WHAT I DID THERE?!) is supposedly intended to make the face itself look smaller and thus more petite and cute. I’m guessing that whenever people put on a pair of the things, they reckon they look like this:

However, they’re more likely to look like the following:

Everywhere I go, I see a handful of people wearing these face-glasses. What’s worrying is that many of these sightings are of folks who wear these sunglasses indoors; and for males, there is no escaping the fact that they look like an absolute arsehat doing this. Once, I saw a guy – typical wanker boy – who was in a shop wearing his tinted glasses like the cool chic guy he isn’t, whilst LOOKING AT OTHER TINTED FACE GLASSES!!
Most of these sunglasses have some fancy-pants brand adorning them, like Dolce and Gabbana or something like that. Now here’s a conspiracy theory for you: The abbreviation of Dolce & Gabbana is D&G (the letters and punctuation mark that adorns everything the brand touches). Notice how that ampersand looks kind of like the letter A:

D&G ----> DAG!!!

What’s even more horrific than this conspiracy of the Dag staring at us in the face (or not, it’s so hard to tell where people are looking considering their D&Ggy face-glasses seem to be permanently attached to their heads), is that this 80s trend is spreading it’s influence on so many other aspects of society.
Nearly every popular musical release steals samples from that decade. Rihanna’s SOS, for example, is basically a karaoke version of Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, just with the lyrics changed; kind of like that comedic device where the words of a popular song is altered to get a laugh, just without the funny, soul and irony.
Nearly every second blockbuster film is a poor adaptation of an 80s invention. And we can’t mention movies without mentioning Napoleon Dynamite, the film that every uni student was quoting non-stop at one point and claiming it as TEH GREATEST FLIM EVA!!2!1!!11!!@! despite it being at best a half-decent film, which is pretty much is a cinematic homage to that decade. And, of course, that ungodly decade was the inspiration for the London 2012 logo.

Maybe I’m getting a little it ahead of myself. Perhaps this whole thing could be an attempt by the children of that era (ie. Born in the 1980s) to recapture a period of time when thing were simpler, where we didn’t have Global Warming, Oil shortages and the War on Ethnics Terrorists bombarding society (instead we had Nuclear Winter, Oil price spikes and the War on Ethnics Communists). It could also be these kids trying to experience the decade in which they were born in, but were too young to experience the…naïve pleasures spawned from that era.
Perhaps, and at this point of the blog I must label this following sentence and paragraph LIES cos the fashion big wigs all read and love this blog and get all of their ideas off of this hereby space (a comment I again must label LIES) and I like my arse the way it is at the moment: unlitigated and firm, like mutton. Where was I? Ah yes. Perhaps, this could just be a campaign by Dolce & Gabbana and other fashion companies to clear out warehouses full of surplus face-glasses and fluoro 80s clothing*.

The only hope I can see in this whole debacle is that fashion, like the folk that follow it almost sheepishly, is an easily distracted creature. For some reason, it stumbled upon some mothballed boxes of bad 80s clothing and accessories, and decided to call that The Modern Fashion. Now that 80s fashion is truly entrenched in society, it will hopefully be a short time before the fashion beast tires of the 80s, and moves on to another decade to be ‘inspired’ by. Here’s hoping that Mr. Versace or Ms. Target bump into a crate of clothes from the 1890s, cos who here doesn’t want to dress up like a grizzly old gold prospector or a character from a Jane Austen novel?

At the moment, though, we’re still dressing and living in the past, with wanker boys and permatan bimbos continuing to dictate market forces and how society runs in general. This Attack of the D&G has made some forget that the uniform they wear so adamantly now as a fashion statement was not so long ago, and will soon be, considered horrifically daggy and naff. I personally can’t wait to see the looks on the faces of so many business students when they realise that the 80s clothes that they have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on has become naff once again. In the meantime, we’ll just wait for the boffins at Fashion Land to unleash a chicken onto their archived wardrobes to pick out the Next Big Thing in fashion, and simultaneously hope that something decent comes out of the Eightiesfication of society – A Captain Planet movie, perhaps?

* LIES!**

** or is it...***


*** YES IT'S LIES****


**** or not...*****


***** YES, YES IT IS!!!